For months in the grim winter of 2012-2013, traumatized superstorm Sandy survivors watched again and again as flood waters crept up their streets.

Some were convinced new sediment in Barnegat Bay was driving tides higher or that the storm had gouged new channels, increasing the volume of tidal flow.

But a newly published report from the U.S. Geological Survey states it was a series of winter storms that drove those post-Sandy high tides, not physical changes to the coastline from the historic disaster.

It was not just the imagination of frightened coastal residents — nearly one-third of the 20 highest tides measured from 2007 to 2013 happened in the five months after Sandy, according to USGS scientists, who examined pre- and post-storm tidal data from Barnegat Bay and Long Island’s Great South Bay.

“Comparisons between water levels before and after Hurricane Sandy at bay (tide gauge) stations and an offshore stations show no significant differences in the transfer of sea level fluctuations from offshore to either bay following Sandy,” states the report, newly published in the science journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Before Sandy, USGS scientists had been working on a comprehensive underwater charting of Barnegat Bay, for use in learning how water circulates during tidal changes, work that resumed last year.

On Great South Bay, there’s been debate for many years about the potential effect of a storm breaking new inlets in the barrier beach, with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and beach replenishment advocates warning that new inlets would raise tide levels all along Long Island’s South Shore towns.

In both bays, the daily tidal range — the rise and fall of water levels — is only 20 percent of the range seen on ocean beaches, because narrow inlets to the bay can only pass a limited volume of water in those roughly 6-hour tide cycles, the report notes. Sandy breached the barrier beaches to both bays, new inlets that were filled within weeks with the exception of the reopened Old Inlet on Fire Island.

Winter 2012-2013 brought five major low-pressure systems affecting the coast, and that experience so soon after Sandy “could have resulted in the perception that Hurricane Sandy somehow altered the coastal system and was responsible for these high water levels,” the authors wrote.